Game #976: Fatal Fury Battle Archives Volume 1

  These guys are furious!

 Unlike Art of Fighting, I actually like Fatal Fury. Not as much as King of Fighters, but I do like it. I first came upon it through a Chinese NES bootleg of FF 2 and I liked it a lot. I loved playing as Kim Kaphwan and perform his bicycle kicks. Fatal Fury: Battle Archives Volume 1 is a compilation of the first four games, the good, the bad and the ugly. 

 Fatal Fury 1 is definitely the ugly one and the bad one. Like Art of Fighting 1 before it, there's a strong emphasis on the single player mode, in which you can only play as Joe, Terry or Andy as you make your way towards Geese Howard. The game is super simple, a punch and a kick, as well as special moves. The CPU can freely move between the background and the foreground, the only thing you can do is perform a chase attack towards their line, although certain attacks send your opponent to the background too.

 The game is simple to a fault and the AI can be pretty tough even on the easiest difficulty setting, good luck against Billy! Fun fact, this game was the original King of Fighters, not that it makes it any less forgettable than it already is!

 ...but then came Fatal Fury 2. There are eight playable characters, and the spritework is on the level of Street Fighter 2.

 The gameplay was polished, now we get four attack buttons, two punches and two kicks, and the controls are more responsive than ever, which makes pulling off special moves a zinch. Now it's possible for the player to move to the background at will. Fatal Fury 2 is a decent game, but there's no combo system so it still pales in comparison to Street Fighter II, but hey, we are getting there!

 Fatal Fury Special is when the series actually turned good. Uses the same sprites from FF 2, but adds 7 new characters for a total of 15. This version includes more difficulty setting, making it more accessible than ever, although some AI opponents are still a bit rough.

 But what makes this game actually good is that we've finally got combos!! The game's speed was increased too, so now the game feels snappier than ever, and being able to pull off combos makes it very fun. Add to that a large cast of characters, for its era, and you've got and underrated classic.

 And then Fatal Fury 3 came out, and the series became great. The character roster went down to 10, but that's because returning characters(Andy, Terry, Joe, Mai) were redrawn, and these new sprites are more detailed than ever. This is also the game that introduces Blue Mary, a personal favorite, and Yamazaki, characters that would eventually make the jump to King of Fighters alongside Andy, Terry, Joe, Mai and Kim.

 As for the gameplay, this time the battleground is divided into three different lines as opposed to two, background, middle ground and foreground. To be honest, I didn't care about this mechanic in the previous games, and I don't care about it now. But the biggest tweak went towards how it plays. Now characters have pre-set combo strings, like dial-up-combos from Mortal Kombat, and they work pretty well. It helps the game feel faster. And that's something the game's got going for it, landing hits feels really good, the animations are great and the overall game looks pretty darn good.

 Fatal Fury: Battle Archives Volume 1 is definitely a better purchase than Art of Fighting Anthology because, while as far as extras and accessibility goes they are the same, these games are much, much better than anything Art of Fighting could offer. There's good value in this compilation, although why it needed to be divided into two discs is beyond me...

 8.0